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Topic: The Misery Challenge (Read 9422 times)

BombBots are excellent. I love when they are on a level. They almost always make it easier. Interestingly, they were some of the worst bots for my initial missions. But once I learned Ninja could ignore them, they got much easier. With Science to disable them and turn them into bot clearing booby traps...I <3 BombBots .

BombBots are excellent. I love when they are on a level. They almost always make it easier. Interestingly, they were some of the worst bots for my initial missions. But once I learned Ninja could ignore them, they got much easier. With Science to disable them and turn them into bot clearing booby traps...I <3 BombBots .

I actually think that raising the PITAR of BombBots with difficulty might be a good idea - given how helpful they can be at clearing a level and how relatively harmless they are. I can definitely confirm that having them in an Expert mission gives me a bit of a breather...

As an alternative they could be made into an eligible target for other bots in case the player is within their explosion AOE .

Surviving the first mission (with three exo deaths) doesn't indicate to me that Misery is too easy Even in AIW on 10/10 you're supposed to be able to survive the early waves if you know what you're doing. Also, I'm not aiming at a 10/10 thing with Misery because different games have different levels of "how fun is this to play without hope of winning?" and I suspect Bionic's is lower because you have a lot less margin for failure. In AIW you can let half the galaxy burn during a major defense and still survive; here you don't get that many fallback positions.

That said, if folks want Misery, or at least Misery+Conducts to be a place where "the achievement isn't winning, the achievement is how long you survive" then I imagine that could be arranged

Agreed on not increasing shields on Misery; in fact if they're currently higher than Expert I'd like to bring them back down to Expert's level. Winning by running the player out of ammo isn't the goal, though it's fine that the player is often driven to expend important ammo earlier than they'd like.

For similar reasons it's best to not increase the overall bot population of missions, since twice the bots has a similar impact as twice the shields on the amount of overall ammo soak.

But we could have it seed a higher-percentage of the higher-PITAR bot types selected for the mission. And perhaps more special bots like Misery mentioned. Same count of bots, more pain. Granted, that does mean a higher total shields on average, but not as dramatically as the above options.

Other than that there are dirty tricks like "Bot In A Closet" with a bot behind an un-scannable door that doesn't open until you enter the room or something like that. But I'm not sure if that just turns into an "RNG says gg, better luck next game!" situation.

Oh, it's not that the difficulty was too low for a single mission.

It's that it was too low for a single mission plus all the conducts.

Now, granted, this is based on MY definition of difficulty, which I'll admit is a little.... warped.

But still, that's what I meant.

Also, yes, increasing the number of bots altogether wouldnt be good. For any difficulty, really. It's just not necessary. And actual stats on bots dont need increasing.

For the overall difficulty, I wouldnt want this to be the sort of thing where it's definitely unwinnable, like 10/10 for AI Wars is meant to be. But the idea was to make it quite significantly harder than Expert, yet without increasing bot stats (so it doesnt get tedious). Expert should always seem viable once you've had enough practice and have gotten good at the game. Misery should be quite the major achievement if you somehow manage to beat it. That's on the BASE difficulty, mind you, without the conducts. Those can of course be added later if the player so desires.

Also, the BombBots, I say those need to be a threat to the PLAYER, not to the enemy. If the player wants to use them in an easy fashion against the enemy, they should require virusing, particularly considering just how much damage they can do to enemy groups; it makes it very worth the trouble to virus them even if it's quite risky.

In a sense not all the conducts were in play, in that the "just take one exo" option could have been pursued as well. But there, currently, you'd just run into an out-of-ammo wall I think, which isn't really in the spirit of !!fun!! . Though if I follow-through on the thought of seeding more ammo chests when there's fewer exos...

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If you REALLY want to make Misery brutal without increasing stats, you could go the New Game+ route a la Defender's Quest and give each bot a small additional perk on Misery. For example:

BombBots - Now have a range 1 attack.EagleBots - Do not trigger mines.HideBots - Not affected by AOE damage if stealthedDumBots - Have 11 ammo and therefor don't miss their first shotBatBots - Can fire immediately after moving if they are in range of a target they likeAmmoBots - Are equipped with the best projectile weapon from another bot type in the current missionetc.

If you REALLY want to make Misery brutal without increasing stats, you could go the New Game+ route a la Defender's Quest and give each bot a small additional perk on Misery. For example:

BombBots - Now have a range 1 attack.EagleBots - Do not trigger mines.HideBots - Not affected by AOE damage if stealthedDumBots - Have 11 ammo and therefor don't miss their first shotBatBots - Can fire immediately after moving if they are in range of a target they likeAmmoBots - Are equipped with the best projectile weapon from another bot type in the current missionetc.

Yea, that's a good idea in general. And actually now that I think about it the AmmoBot one would even be feasible with the way the code is written. Though it might be ludicrously-OP in some cases

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Another way to bump difficulty without bumping stats could be to make the bots a little more vicious, e.g. by letting them target fuel tanks or BombBots at the cost of some casualties to catch the player in the AOE of the explosion.

And you have WAY more patience than I do to keep editing all that text in there.

On a total side note, an idea that I got while watching this: A conduct that adds a single MurderBot to spawn somewhere in each mission. Which of course knows where you are right from the start regardless of where it spawns. Because !!fun!!, yes?

On a total side note, an idea that I got while watching this: A conduct that adds a single MurderBot to spawn somewhere in each mission. Which of course knows where you are right from the start regardless of where it spawns. Because !!fun!!, yes?

I was thinking somewhere along the same lines, only far less extreme. On Hard and above perhaps add a boss to each Blockade mission? The mission would of been entirely too easy if it wasn't for that super high HP Recoilbot.

At this point instead of spamming the thread follow my youtube or (preferably) Dailymotion channel. I got more coming

Followed on dailymotion Though the video links were far from spam, of course.

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LOL whose idea was that to put the Skybot into the game?

Probably Chris's, possibly Josh's. It's been long enough that I might just be forgetting my part in the idea. I don't think any of the voice lines were my idea specifically. My response to the "I choose you" line was pretty similar to yours.

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Apparently some people crack under pressure. I don't quite get that. After all, when things get tough the only thing to do is rise to the challenge.

"Run like a sissy" is a popular alternative.

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I was thinking somewhere along the same lines, only far less extreme. On Hard and above perhaps add a boss to each Blockade mission? The mission would of been entirely too easy if it wasn't for that super high HP Recoilbot.

Blockade missions are supposed to be pretty mild, and it tends to plant a number of them near your HQ for that reason. I think there are some boss/situation combos that might just be flatly "gg" on the first couple missions unless you take Genji+Siege or something like that.

Excellent pick on Rey, btw, his partial circumvention of "Dead Is Dead" is quite effective. Not that it's any consolation to your Assault Exo. On re-watching the first video I found that your assault had actually been killed twice (by the same bot) before its fateful encounter with that BombBot. The number on Rey's portrait in the bottom-left shows how many extra lives are left, and it was reading zero before your assault was set up the bomb.

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